Old Testament ripped off from Egypt

You guys didn’t know about this already? Yeah, it isn’t commone knowledge at all unfortunately. But it does seem to be the case that Judaism and Christianity are almost completely plagiarized from various Pagan religions that far predated either Judaism or Christianity or any prophecies therein. There are 200+ direct and rather striking similarities between just the Jesus character and the the Egyptian God Horus. There are also many other bibilcal characters and stories and names and places and even dates that seem to be taken directly from Egyptian mythology.

The same is case with Jesus and Krishna (aka “Christna Jezeus”), the Indian pagan God. For the savior cahracters here, Jesus Christ and Christna Jezeus, there are 346 striking similarities. Other major similarities are found in many other Pagan religions as well. Dionysis, Hesus, Buddha, Mithra etc. All predating Christianity/Judaism.

Though with Mithra, though it has the most striking similarities outside of Krishna/Christna and Horus, most of the religion was passed on by way of word of mouth and only started recording in written words after Christianity showed up. Though there are artifacts and art that seems to corroberate the idea that the written mythology did in fact seem the same mythology that was only spoken/artwork until post-Christianity. To be fair, if in a debate, you can throw out Mithra as with Krishna and Horus, you should have all the ammo you need.

Also, several early church fathers admitted that their ideas were niether unique nor new. This is even recorded both by ancient historians following the church’s progress in the region as well as the church itself. Yes, we have actual historical evidence that there were many church leaders who put the bible together at the council of Nicea, who said, on the hsitorical record that their ideas weren’t new nor unique. We also have historical evidence that someone named Celsus later questioned the early church on this topic and other church leaders acknowledge that it looked bad.

Ironically enough, we actually have MORE historical evidence that the accusations and subsequent debate on the topic of fraud and plagiarizm took place in the early church than we have for the existence of anyone named Jesus!

Even more interesting is where the Pagans are believed to have gotten their ideas from, ancient astrology. They watched the skies, made up stories about the movement of the heavens in primitive attempts to explain why their crops lived and died based on the seasons etc, and then created elaborate mythologies based on their observations. Then the ideas were stolen by Christianity/Judaism later on.

Justin Martyr, an early father of the church and church apologist, even created a defense for why things looked like they had stole it all…he said the devil had come to earth long before the days of Jesus and planted into these ancient pagan religions these ideas, effectively “pre-copying” Christianity. No, I’m not kidding. He literally said the Devil did it to trick us, lol. He said the pagans were worshipping the ideas of the Devil, and thus, the notion that Pagans were Devil worshipper began. A move by Martyr that both politically charged the defense from accusations of plagiarism as well as helped sling mud at the rivalling religions. Paganism was then outlawed by penalty of death in the region.

So next time you debate with a Christian, be sure to get their words on record that they claim to not be Pagan astrologers.

It’s been a few years, but I have read Greenberg’s book. While I will agree with you, Noggin, that it is both provocative and enlightening, it is also only one mans opinions.

Now, mind you, I am not saying he is wrong (I happen to agree with much he says). However, such textual comparisons are always open to debate. Human beings are pattern seeking animals, and will often seek patterns that aren’t there. Greenberg certainly makes a compelling argument, but without what the art world calls a “provenance”, it will be difficult to prove he’s right.

There is no paper trail from Egyptian priest to the Palestinian Temple. As Greenberg himself points out, there is no evidence for Moses, indeed, there is no evidence for the Exodus at all, and little to none that the Israelites ever lived in Egypt in appreciable numbers. And, while there is evidence for contact with Babylon, the writings we possess can only be dated to somewhere around the third century BCE.

Because of this, people will always be able to refute claims of plagiarism (I have read historians who try to claim that Amenhotep IV [you may know him better as Ankhenaten, but he’ll always be Amenhotep IV to me] was inspired in monotheism by Moses. Seriously) Indeed, a friend of mine recently claimed that I couldn’t deny that the Bible is the most historically accurate book ever written. Of course, I did. (He is the poster boy for the home schooling movement )

Anyway, if this stuff interest you, I would also suggest you read Mythic Past, by Thomas L. Thompson, which argues that the Bible is poetry, metaphor, and myth from an archaeological standpoint. Some might also suggest Richard Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible, but I must admit that I personally felt that he relied too much on the historicity of certain figures who cannot be verified by either archaeology or by contemporaneous historical documentation. Of course, that’s just me :wink: .

Given your username I would think you would know that early church leaders were well aware of the accusations of plagiarism. A mane named Celsus in fact was among the ppl claiming there was plagiarism going on. There are also examples of early church leaders openly admitting that their ideas/stories etc were not unique nor new and can be seen in many of the pagan religions. Historical documentation oddly enough favors the debate over the plagiarism issue itself moreso than the claim that a man named Jesus walked the earth…let alone the details of his life.

Even more interesting is where the Pagans are believed to have gotten their ideas from, ancient astrology. They watched the skies, made up stories about the movement of the heavens in primitive attempts to explain why their crops lived and died based on the seasons etc, and then created elaborate mythologies based on their observations. Then the ideas were stolen by Christianity/Judaism later on.

The book Jesus Christ: Sun of God by David Fiedlier goes into detail about some of the borrowing from pagan religions.

As far as the pagan ideas coming from ancient astrology, the story is a bit more complex. The Summarian religion involved mainly nature-deities. The astrological side came in as priests looked for ways to time the various seasonal festivals and found the regularities of the planets to provide a good clock. (This was a step back from the agricultural point of view, rather than relying on human experts who could say the proper time for planting, or harvest each year based on local conditions, these got locked into an astral calendar.) The gods, as it were, receded into the heavens and the planets were taken as their actual physical bodies. The rays of light from them were the means the gods used to see and control things on the earth. (The ancient translation of the name for the ziggurat in Bablyon was something like “Temple for receiving the divine commands from above.”) When the Persians conquered the Mesopotamia, the religion absorbed the idea of good and evil from Zorastrianism so that good became associated with ascent into the heavens after death. This influenced the Greeks, going into the Orphic cult (an outgrowth itself of the cult of Dionysus) and Pythagoras. From all this comes the idea of the soul as descending from the heavens at birth and returning there at death (with its resonances in Platonism). Astrology itself seems to have developed out of earlier Bablyonian/Chaldean attempts to associate events on the earth with the movement of the planets, but horoscope astrology was only developed by the Greeks, applying the new rationalism to the Bablyonian idea. (It was first introduced to Greece on the island of Kos, but the complete development of horoscope astrology as a deterministic system may well be due to Posidonius.)

A/Ibrahim(not his name yet) was a priest of the Sumerian deity EL. His tribe was small and had maintained a separate culture from many of the other followers of the Sumerian Trinity of Gods, so as a tribal leader, he declared a revelation from El(as in Israel -chosen of God, and Daniel - beloved of God) that the tribe could take no other God before HIM, El, and by the way, never say or write MY NAME again, except in a code understood only by the priesthood, so we can forget about that whole EL/Triumvirate thing. Abraham was a capable leader and warlord, and his tribe prospered. The priesthood he founded included much of the Sumerian religions myths of creation and the flood into their repertoire and maintained their ‘secret’ knowledge of the Sumerian calendar and astrological systems to keep themselves in position of power. They taught their tribe cultural racism and apartheid, but allowed enslaved and captured women to bare legitimate children, to avoid the inbreeding that even prehistoric humans knew, led to birth defects. So….slavery was ok, but not of your close neighbors, because that might defeat the purpose – diversity of the gene pool.

This tribe maintained its genetic and cultural uniqueness very successfully. The shared religion allowed leaders to exhort them to martial ferocity, when wronged, or to take some other tribes property and land. Remember the time they were supposed to kill every living thing in Canaan and make the land theirs? It took uncommon will, devotion, and brutality for such a small tribe to conquer a larger more technologically advanced civilization such as the Canaanites. This cultural bigotry served them well for over a thousand years. It also made them a universally hated tribe.

So, after they have been defeated and displaced several times, and finally completely conquered by the Romans, a group of radical Jewish rabbis, Zoroastrian priest, and Roman Freethinkers, used the local stories about a Jewish Rabbi/carpenter, embellished them borrowing heavily from the messianic traditions of Judaism which were stolen from the Sumerian religion, created the Christ myth. It took them quite a while, and they didn’t get around to recording all of this until decades after the events supposedly had taken place. But…it is much easier to make up events after the fact, when the people who were there/then aren’t around to dispute the ‘facts.’

A few hundred years after that, a learned merchant that lives a life of leisure due to marrying a much older but wealthy widow, studies the Jewish religion, and realizes its real problem is its exclusivity. So he copies large parts of it, and creates a religion that invites everyone to join. In fact it often insists. He keeps the most holy spot in his homeland though, and discourages translations from the Arabic, so his tribe maintains Top Dog First of the First status. The End of Time myth involves a leader, or Great Caliph, that can really only come from his tribe. So, in typical tribal fashion, members of the other powerful and rival tribe in the region, the Persians, claim the Arabic descendants have gotten it wrong, and they are the true carriers of the flame.

So, Christians begin loosing ground to Islam and begin the Crusades and the Inquisition. Islam gets pissed and begins taking parts of Europe in order give the Infidels a chance to convert. That only gets so far as the Shia/Sunni/Persian/Arabic infighting keep them too occupied with each other to maintain their triumphs over the Christians.

It ain’t over yet folks.

Men create religions to consolidate tribal power and control other tribes of men.

Given your username I would think you would know that early church leaders were well aware of the accusations of plagiarism. A mane named Celsus in fact was among the ppl claiming there was plagiarism going on. There are also examples of early church leaders openly admitting that their ideas/stories etc were not unique nor new and can be seen in many of the pagan religions. Historical documentation oddly enough favors the debate over the plagiarism issue itself moreso than the claim that a man named Jesus walked the earth…let alone the details of his life.

But of course, as my user name would imply, I am familiar with the arguments for plagiarism by the early Christians. In fact, when I am prompted, I usually describe Christianity as a combination of the Jewish notion of a messiah, Greek philosophy, and Mediterranean mystery cults. But what I believe was not the point of my post.

My point was that accusations of plagiarism cannot be proved to a fare-thee-well, and even if they could, most of the faithful wouldn’t be swayed. There have been many people who have claimed to come up with the smoking gun that will finally bury the Abrahamic faiths, but this so far hasn’t happened. Christianity was doubted almost from it’s inception, but those intellectual arguments hardly have an effect on a religion that is wholly dependent upon an emotionally based faith.

My supposition is that even if the paper trail that clearly laid a path from ancient paganism to Christianity were uncovered, it would be ignored in much the same way that people ignore the fossil evidence that shows a clear progression from fish to mammals. I’m sure that if such documentation is ever unearthed, the credulous would claim that it was planted there by Satan to test their faith, much in the same way that Justin Martyr claimed that demons, who had a foreknowledge of Jesus’ future life, imitated his doings in the form of pagan gods and heroes.

This isn’t to say that such scholarship isn’t useful (or fun). I just doubt that it will kill Christianity on it’s own. However, if anyone wants to prove me wrong, I am certainly willing to hear about it.

People have said that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards would produce the works of Shakespeare, but the internet has shown this to be wrong.

I think most Christians are easier to sway than you might think Celsus. The amount of “similarities” between Judaism/Christianity is quite a bit more than mere coincidence would allow for. We are talking about 200 pretty detailed similarities between Jesus and Horus, and nearly 350 for Jesus and Krishna. I’d say the paper trail, when you note that Martyr and others admitted it more or less, it makes a compelling case that most moderates may not be able to ignore.

I agree the most devout wouldn’t care, but then again, many mderates would seriously question it. I’ve mentioned it to a few of my friends before who were moderates and they looked into it and now are asking very tough questions to their churches and so far they don’t seem real satisfied with the answers (None of the 3 had youth ministers who had ever heard of this controversy and 2 of them had the heads of their particular church not know about it. One even was unaware there was a council of Nicea!!!) There is ironcially more historical evidence for this debate and these accusations than there ever was for Jesus existing, lol.

I think it would take some major work of art like a respectable film or a novel or some fictional story told in some way that depicts some of these events to get a much mroe widespread exposure. I think the reason why this isn’t propogated much is simply because it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge for common folk. Hopefully that changes.

It is true that most of the Christian narrative is much older than Christian times and it is also true that faith trumps logic. It does not matter where the beliefs came from, just that they are obeyed and believed. That is the great universal truth about religion. If Christianity is a worthy faith then all the faiths that it is derived from it are also worthy of faith. In other words, there is no need to be parsing the truth between Adam and Eve and Geb and Nut. Whether the teachings come from Jesus or from ancient Egypt, believers do not discriminate. It does not really matter if there is rampant plagiarism among the religions. No one really cares where the source of where the truth resides. It does not really matter if Jesus existed. If we go back far enough in time we will run into someone who did whether it be Osiris or earlier. No one cares to analyze the source of their beliefs and the similarities of their faith with other faiths and to make judgements of one faith over another. Religion is not really chosen, it chooses us. There is no real freedom of religion but only freedom of faith. That is the definition of faith. It means no analysis, no discrimination, no judgement. Just acceptance. Only scholars care to analyze such things and we are in the great minority. We can trumpet these findings all we want. It is falling on deaf ears. We might as well focus our energies on better things and hope the faithful do not annihilate themselves believing their religion is better than another not realizing they are all worshiping the same God.